I found a brother laser printer for 8 bucks at a thrift store and it printed with linux over USB as soon as I got it home without any tweaking.
I then directly networked it to a raspberry pi, configured it with cups and shared the printer over my network. Every device was able to discover it instantly and I can print from anything, android phone, ipad, mac, linux laptop, etc.
It's absolutely freeing. I found an OEM toner cartridge for like 30 bucks, so I have like 2000 bw prints ready to go for like 40 dollars all in.
I will talk shit about a lot of printers, but I've had a Brother workhorse laser for years. It's black and white. You tell it to print and it spits out pages. I don't know if they still make them that way but they used to be amazing at the very least.
Gotta be a Brother
I found a brother laser printer for 8 bucks at a thrift store and it printed with linux over USB as soon as I got it home without any tweaking.
I then directly networked it to a raspberry pi, configured it with cups and shared the printer over my network. Every device was able to discover it instantly and I can print from anything, android phone, ipad, mac, linux laptop, etc.
It's absolutely freeing. I found an OEM toner cartridge for like 30 bucks, so I have like 2000 bw prints ready to go for like 40 dollars all in.
I will talk shit about a lot of printers, but I've had a Brother workhorse laser for years. It's black and white. You tell it to print and it spits out pages. I don't know if they still make them that way but they used to be amazing at the very least.
They do, absolute workhorses with no bullshit. Only printer I will ever pay money for.